[giaour]

> I thought, like China, [Russia] would ultimately ban it to prevent civilians from easily exiting the Russian economy. (another legitimate use of cryptocurrency that is often overlooked)

You're kind of proving GP's point here. Evading capital controls is a criminal activity, and, though this is an example of a crime that we would all agree is morally righteous, you're still arguing that cryptocurrency is good because it makes crime easier.

[_zllx]

Good catch, but assuming evading capital controls is crime, then this becomes a debate of victimless crime. Under normal circumstances, it's not victimless, because it can hurt the economy and everyone in it. Who is the victim of a Russian civilian evading their establishment? I don't see the criminals running the establishment as a victim; they already did the most damage to their economy, and they're still the perpetrators of other crimes with many victims. Cryptocurrency makes everything pertaining to money easier, unfortunately crime too depending on what is considered crime, and I think it's still a net benefit. No matter what happens, we can't rely on implicit control of money as an easy way to punish crime anymore, no amount of debating or essays or letters will close that box.

[giaour]

> Cryptocurrency makes everything pertaining to money easier, unfortunately crime too

This is where you lose me. Cryptocurrency makes most transactions considerably more difficult, and so far, the one segment of the economy that has consistently been willing to accept those tradeoffs is the criminal world. No one is going to argue that the law is always right or that criminals are always wrong -- after all, Oskar Schindler and Aristides de Sousa Mendes were criminals -- but what you are arguing here is that it's important to retain a tool to subvert the law for when the law becomes unjust.

I'm not saying you're wrong! I just happen to believe the harm of bad crime enabled by crypto outweighs the positive effects of crypto-enabled crime, but that's a personal opinion and one that might change if the world does. People in the US make a similar argument about guns (that retaining the ability to overthrow a tyrannical government is worth the extra gun crime we have to ensure); I disagree with them, too, but I would not be so sure if I lived in eastern Ukraine today or Berlin in 1941.

[_zllx]

I see it as a kind of gold, or perhaps in a less cliche way of putting it, a sovereign unit of account. I call it easier because it can be handled entirely digitally with no great expenses to transfer it around the world unlike gold, therefore easily being used on the smartphones of people who need it. It is true that the tech currently has many shortcomings in accessibility now, but I see none that can't be overcome with further development. For an example, see Celo's development of a decentralized phone-number-to-EVM-address linking system. Actually, a lot of the projects surrounding Celo are what inspire me to publicly defend cryptocurrency, but I don't bring it up much because I'd be accused of shilling them.

Anyway, I think that cryptocurrency enables lots more non-criminal and should-be-non-criminal activity that can far outnumber the harmful-criminal activity. Perhaps it's already that way, or perhaps it will be so in the future. "In the future" is admittedly another pro-crypto cliche, but we're seeing results headed in that trajectory like the ones mentioned in the financialinclusion letter.